Sony releases new videos showing off the AR tech it's developing.
Between Oculus Rift and Sony's own Project Morpheus,
the big craze of late has been virtual reality. In addition to VR, Sony
has been working with augmented reality technology for several years
now, and today it released new videos of PlayStation 4 tech demos
showing what it's been up to.
On PlayStation's Japanese website (as spotted by NeoGAF),
two videos were released to show off the AR lighting technology it's
developed which presumably makes use of the PlayStation 4 camera. The
first of these shows a man holding up two squares with pictures on them
that cause box-shaped fishbowls, of sorts, to appear on-screen. He
proceeds to "pour" the water (and accompanying rubber duck--Sony loves
its rubber duck tech demos) from one into the other before pouring it onto the ground
The other video shows a person moving a flashlight back and forth over a
dinosaur and then Japanese character Hatsune Miku. This creates a
shadow on the on-screen floor that moves based on the position of the
light and the character.
Lastly, shown only in the form of a single screenshot was PS4 "trading
card recognition" technology reminiscent of the PlayStation 3 game The Eye of Judgment, albeit with Hatsune Miku in place of monsters.
Sony is not the only company exploring augmented reality tech. In 2012, it was rumored that Microsoft was developing augmented-reality glasses,
known as "Fortaleza," for release in 2014 on the Xbox One. Meanwhile,
former Valve employees raised more than $1 million on Kickstarter last
year for their augmented reality system castAR.
Sony, like Microsoft, has not made any formal announcements regarding
plans to release any augmented reality gaming technology, meaning we may
never see any of this put to use.
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